Howard Bloom, Ph.D.
Chief Social Scientist, MDRC

Howard Bloom is a chief social scientist at MDRC. Dr. Bloom leads the development of experimental and quasi-experimental methods for estimating program impacts initiative, working closely with MDRC staff to build these methods into their research. He came to MDRC in 1999, following 21 years of teaching research methods, program evaluation, and applied statistics at Harvard University and at New York University, where he received the Great Teacher Award in 1993. The author of numerous articles and several books, Dr. Bloom has been a principal investigator of four major randomized experiments: the National Job Training Partnership Act study, a 20,000-person evaluation conducted in 16 U.S. cities; the Earnings Supplement Project, an 8,000-person study conducted in five Canadian cities; the Texas Displaced Worker Study; and the Delaware Displaced Worker Study. Having earned his bachelor's degree in engineering from Case Western Reserve University, Dr. Bloom holds a Master of City Planning, a Master of Public Administration, and a Ph.D. in political economy and government from Harvard University.

Margaret Burchinal, Ph.D.
Senior Scientist and Director of the Data Management and Analysis Center at the FPG Child Development Institute;
Research Professor in Psychology, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Margaret Burchinal is the senior scientist and director of the data management and analysis center at the Frank Porter Graham (FPG) Child Development Institute and a research professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Dr. Burchinal has served as the primary statistician for many educational studies of early childhood, including the 11-state Pre-Kindergarten Evaluation for the National Center for Early Learning and Development, the longitudinal study of 1300 children in NICHD Study of Early Child Care; the 4 state evaluation of child care in the Cost, Quality, and Child Outcomes Study; the 3 site study of family child care homes in the Family Child Care and Relative Care Study, and the Abecedarian and CARE Projects. As an applied methodologist, she has helped to demonstrate that sophisticated methods such as meta-analysis (See Burchinal et al., 2000), fixed-effect modeling (see NICHD ECCRN & Duncan, 2003), hierarchical linear modeling, piecewise regression (see Campbell et al, 2001), and generalized estimating equations provide educational researchers with advanced techniques to address important educational issues such as whether child care quality measures are biased (Burchinal & Cryer, 2003). In addition, she has pursued her substantive interest in early education as a means to improve school readiness for at-risk children, and is a leading contributor to this literature.

David S. Cordray, Ph.D.
Professor of Public Policy and Professor of Psychology at Vanderbilt University

David Cordray is Professor of Public Policy and Professor of Psychology at Vanderbilt University. He is a member of the Quantitative Methods and Evaluation Program within the Department of Psychology and Human Development. He is Director of the interdisciplinary Experimental Education Research Training (ExpERT) predoctoral training program and Director of its post-doctoral counterpart (ExpERT Plus). He was recently awarded a grant (with Dale Farran and Mark Lipsey) from IES to develop methods for assessing intervention fidelity in randomized field trials. Professor Cordray has written extensively on research and evaluation methodology in education and human services areas. He has conducted experimental, quasi-experimental and meta-analytic assessments of intervention effectiveness in education, health, welfare, juvenile justice, and homelessness. Professor Cordray was a member of the Board of Directors for the Evaluation Research Society and the American Evaluation Association, and is Past-President of the American Evaluation Association. He has served on dozens of technical advisory committees for national evaluations in education and related areas. He has been on editorial boards for major evaluation journals; he has served on a dozen Institute of Medicine/National Research Council committees and panels for the National Academy of Sciences; and he was a long-term (1992-2001) member of the Evaluation Review Panel in the Office of the Deputy Secretary of Education, U.S. Department of Education. Currently, he is a principal member IES's review panel for the Reading and Writing competitions. He is a National Associate Member of the National Academy of Sciences.

Fred Doolittle, Ph.D.
Director of the Policy Research and Evaluation Department, MDRC

Fred Doolittle is the director of policy research and evaluation at MDRC. Dr. Doolittle joined MDRC in 1986, initially specializing in studies of employment and training programs for economically disadvantaged out-of-school youth and adults. As MDRC expanded its work to include education, he focused on evaluations of elementary and secondary school reforms. The author of many publications, Dr. Doolittle has served as the research director or project director for numerous MDRC demonstrations and evaluations, and he is also heavily involved in writing proposals, developing research designs for new projects, and reviewing reports and other products. He has served on the faculties of Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government, the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton.

John W. Graham, Ph.D.
Professor, Department of Biobehavioral Health at Pennsylvania State University

John W. Graham is a professor in the department of Biobehavioral Health at Pennsylvania State University. Dr. Graham received his Ph.D. degree in Social Psychology in 1983 from the University of Southern California. For the past 25 years, Dr. Graham's research focus has been on drug and alcohol abuse prevention in adolescent and young adult populations. Over the years, Dr. Graham's substantive work has involved intervention and prevention-theory research, and has been largely in collaboration with substance abuse prevention researchers from around the country. Dr. Graham's methodological work has always been in service to the valid evaluation of a larger prevention intervention program. His research in this regard has involved development of measures; measurement strategies for large-scale interventions; exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis; and structural equation modeling and mediating variable analysis. Since the late 1980s, Dr. Graham's work has focused on analysis of missing data, including multiple imputation and several maximum likelihood methods for handling missing data. Most recently, Dr. Graham's work has centered on "planned missing data" measurement designs. These designs take advantage of the modern missing data analysis tools to produce strategies for cost effective data collection and analysis.

Larry V. Hedges, Ph.D.
Board of Trustees Professor of Statistics;
Faculty Fellow, Institute for Policy Research, Northwestern University

Larry Hedges is a professor of statistics at Northwestern University. A national leader in the fields of educational statistics and evaluation, Dr. Hedges is best known for his work to develop statistical methods for meta-analysis (a statistical analysis of the results of multiple studies that combines their findings) in the social, medical, and biological sciences. It is a key component of evidence-based social research. Examples of some his recent studies include: understanding the costs of generating systematic reviews, differences between boys and girls in mental test scores, the black-white gap in achievement test scores, and frameworks for international comparative studies on education. He has authored or co-authored numerous journal articles and five books, including the seminal Statistical Methods for Meta-Analysis: A Practical Guide to Modern Methods of Meta-Analysis (with I. Olkin) and The Handbook of Research Synthesis (with H. Cooper).

Mark W. Lipsey, Ph.D.
Director of the Center for Evaluation Research and Methodology and a Senior Research Associate at the Vanderbilt Institute for Public Policy Studies, Vanderbilt University

Mark W. Lipsey is the Director of the Center for Evaluation Research and Methodology and a Senior Research Associate at the Vanderbilt Institute for Public Policy Studies. He specializes in program evaluation and field experimentation methodology with a focus on programs for at-risk children. His current research activities involve early childhood educational programs, risk and intervention for antisocial behavior, and issues of methodological quality in program evaluation. His published work includes Evaluation: A Systematic Approach (with Peter Rossi and Howard Freeman) and Practical Meta-Analysis (with David Wilson). Dr. Lipsey has served on the editorial boards of various research journals, grant proposal review panels for IES, NIH, and NIJ, and advisory boards or committees for, among others, the National Research Council and the Department of Education. His research has been funded by grants from IES, NIH, NIJ, NSF, and several foundations and has been recognized by awards from such organizations as the American Evaluation Association, the Society for Prevention Research, and the Campbell Collaboration.

Ina Wallace, Ph.D.
Senior Research Psychologist at RTI International

Ina Wallace is a Senior Research Psychologist at RTI International. Dr Wallace's areas of expertise include assessment of children and families from diverse ethnic and linguistic backgrounds, evaluation of preventive interventions targeting children and families, and training staff in assessment and data collection procedures. Dr. Wallace is responsible for reviewing, selecting, and developing measures for participants in a variety of studies as well as training field staff in their administration. Dr. Wallace has served as project director/research scientist on a variety of projects funded by the Education Department, NICHD, CDC, and non-governmental organizations. Dr. Wallace's current research activities involve early childhood educational programs, early hearing screening, and school readiness issues of infants who were maltreated. Dr. Wallace has served on the faculty of Albert Einstein College of Medicine and University of North Carolina School of Medicine.

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